Where Is Your Refuge


Download (right click and choose save as)

Once there were just a handful of people who were infected and they were all congregated in one city. That represented the best chance to completely isolate and eliminate this new contagion before it could spread. The Government tried to do just that, but they botched the whole operation and their bumbling efforts only caused it to spread further afield. Infected people fled into other cities and neighboring regions causing the number of exposures to multiply exponentially. Soon it was racing across international borders, and, vigorous as a weed, it was passed from person to person and town to town. Along the way it up-ended lives and radically altered entire civilizations.

Am I talking about covid-19? No, I’m talking about Christianity. The growth of the early church was like a powerful contagion that burst onto the scene in the first century Roman world and spread like wild fire. In Acts 17:6 the men of Thessalonica captured the mood well when they said of Christian missionaries, “These men who have turned the world upside down have come here also.” It’s as if there had been no confirmed cases of Christianity in Thessalonica up to that point, but then all of a sudden it showed up in their midst and they were alarmed.

As we seek to stop the spread of a virus we must not lose sight of our calling to actively spread Christianity but what does it look like to be an evangelist in the days of Coronavirus? It’s a good question because most of our evangelistic tools have historically involved face-to-face interactions and invitations to come to worship gatherings.

I hope you can listen as we take up this question and worship our God through the study of His Word.